{"product_id":"zlisabeth-9781968671006","title":"Élisabeth","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eWitty banter, lust, ennui, and an undercurrent of violence percolate beneath a seemingly paradisiacal summer on the eve of World War II, in this landmark translation of the first and only novel by Éric Rohmer, the French New Wave's most prolific and beloved filmmaker.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFifteen years before completing his first feature film--and ten before beginning a transformative editorial stint at \u003ci\u003eCahiers du cinéma\u003c\/i\u003e that would usher the journal, and French cinema, into a new era--the man who would become known worldwide as Éric Rohmer published a single novel. Released by Éditions Gallimard alongside the early works of Claude Simon and Marguérite Duras, Élisabeth was part of the first flowering of what would come to be known as the \u003ci\u003enouveau roman\u003c\/i\u003e--and was also the \"matrix,\" as Rohmer himself later put it, of the images, ideas, and formal concerns of his first sequence of films, \u003ci\u003eSix Moral Tales\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSet in the sunstruck countryside east of Paris during the summer of 1939, a year ahead of the German invasion, where the upper-middle-class Roby family and its eponymous matriarch are spending a listless summer, \u003ci\u003eÉlisabeth\u003c\/i\u003e is a war-novel awaiting a war. While the teenage Roby children and their friends swim, flirt, and lie to one another among the baking fields and icy meanders of the Marne, the novel becomes the scene of an anticipatory haunting. The simmering paranoia, calculated blankness, and potential violence of the coming Occupation are already present--as it were, in mufti. With a cool, kaleidoscopic eye, Rohmer lays out his protagonists and their precarious peace--their restlessness, their desperate boredom, their petty romantic agonies--with the unsettling chilliness and the sinister exactitude of details on a tactical map.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eBinding Type:\u003c\/b\u003e Paperback\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublisher:\u003c\/b\u003e McNally Editions\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublished:\u003c\/b\u003e 07\/07\/2026\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN:\u003c\/b\u003e 9781968671006\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePages:\u003c\/b\u003e 232","brand":"Eric Rohmer","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":52507636498613,"sku":"9781968671006","price":16.15,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0473\/0804\/6492\/files\/img_c064f365-fcbb-4ff6-98e4-199ea3390147.jpg?v=1778566283","url":"https:\/\/pastforward.org\/products\/zlisabeth-9781968671006","provider":"Past Forward","version":"1.0","type":"link"}